British Humour Quotes

“And now for something completely different . . . ”
― John Cleese

“What the hell. If you had to go, why not go with style?”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“And this? Aldhelm of Malmesbury. Listen to this page: 'Primitus pantorum procerum poematorum pio potissimum paternoque presertim privilegio panegiricum poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promulgatas.' ... The words all begin with the same letter!"

"The men of my islands are all a bit mad," William said proudly.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“My eyes must spend at least fifty per cent of any given day rolled to the back of my head.”
― Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie

“They’d never get here in time. It’s easy. A lobotomized monkey could do it.” “And where are we going to find a lobotomized monkey at this time of night?”
― Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

“If caring about whether you live or die makes me an arse, then I’m the biggest arse in Great Britain, and proud of it.”
― Stephanie R. Caffrey, Mistaken Identity

“The corporal said, “Place called Brest. Not the kind of name I’d like to call a town, myself, but that’s the way these Froggies are. Officer said to go there if we got cut off, and we’d get the lorry shipped back home from there.”
― Nevil Shute, Pied Piper

“Catherine said, "There's something I don't get."

Ho waited.

"You're telling us you've got friends?”
― Mick Herron, Slow Horses

“She deigned to asked me how ice queens reproduce. I grinned, and her mother looked horrified.
“We procreate by way of ice cubes, of course. We put them in our nests and let them incubate for the period of about four months, and when the temperature is right, we put them out to roost and let them flake off into billions of snowflakes, rather like tadpoles breaking in droves from their eggs. And that, child,” I said, with a simulacrum of glee, “is how winter is born.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No more than the approach of Monday does to most of the world. It is a natural process, you understand, but it is dreadful hard work.”
― Michelle Franklin

“Nothing is
eternal.
Everything else
is not.”
― Will Advise

“Mrs. Woodfidley was inviting the guests to assemble for drinks, which were being handed out by Mr. Woodfidley and Garson from a long table in the bay window. The bottles and glasses had been visible from the first and their serried ranks must have drawn longing glances from more persons than herself - it would have been so much easier to sing and talk if even a single drink had been given one at the start of the party. But now she had guessed that the party was organized in set figures, like a formal country dance, and that the delay in serving drinks must be due to this plan. The figure in which drinks were consumed had just begun; it would succeeded by another after a fixed interval of time, and therefore she had better make sure of a drink before the music changed.”
― Elizabeth Fair, A Winter Away

“The whole plan's so high on the cheese factor it's practically Stilton”
― Zadie Smith

“What did the soup say to the tea plate?
"You're too shallow for me. I like deep dish to dip right into!" I still keep my British humour in good taste. No room for egos or rumours.”
― Ana Claudia Antunes

“He put a fresh sheet in and, after spending a few moments wishing he were doing something quite different, typed:

Gregory: But this is really qutie farcical.

Like all the other lines of dialogue he had so far evolved, it struck him as not only in need of instant replacement, but as requiring a longish paragraph of negative stage direction in the faint hope of getting it said ordinarily, and not ordinarily in inverted commas, either. Experimentally, he typed:

(Say this without raising your chin or opening your eyes wide or tilting your face or putting on that look of vague affront you use when you think you are "underlining the emergence of a new balance of forces in the scheme of the action" like the producer told you or letting your mind focus more than you can help on sentences like "Mr. Recktham managed to breathe some life into the wooden and conventional part of Gregory" or putting any more expression into it than as if you were reading aloud something you thought was pretty boring (and not as if you were doing an imitation of someone on a stage reading aloud something he thought was pretty boring, either) or hesitating before or after "quite" or saying "fusskle" instead of "farcical".)

Breathing heavily, Bowen now x-ed out his original line of dialogue and typed:

Gregory: You're just pulling my leg.”
― Kingsley Amis, I Like It Here

“Meow.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...: soliD Amateur quoetry

“Youir're doing this wrong.”
― Will Advise

“If there is one pleasure on earth which surpasses all others, it is leaving a play before the end. I might perhaps except the joy of taking tickets for a play, dining well, sitting on after dinner, and finally not going at all. That, of course, is very heaven.”
― Angela Thirkell, High Rising

“He's so fucking crooked he sleeps on a spiral staircase!”
― Dylan Moran, Dylan Moran Live - What It Is

“The Penultimate Hotel by Stewart Stafford

Enter sluggishly into the lobby,
A banquet is in progress in the restaurant,
They’re regurgitating reality from within,
And then eating their young.

An apocalyptic porter has radioactive cubes in the lift,
Housekeeping will have ten thousand years of light,
But the sheets in the rooms,
Will all turn to cream cheese.

The cooks in the kitchen are breaking bones and rules,
Creating a cake that stretches to infinity,
Babel babble with protesting eggs,
All baked in a hellfire oven.

The concierge gives out tips,
And tells guests they are awful and to leave,
While simultaneously tattooing diabolical potion recipes,
Inside a willing bellhop’s eyelids.

© 2021, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“It is the first day of spring. The council have chopped all the elms down in Elm Tree Avenue.”
― Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole

“Oooh friend! Football friend!”
― Jay, The Inbetweeners

“It is the first day of spring. The council have chopped all the elms down in Elm Tree Avenue”
― Sue TownsendTownsend, The secret diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾

“It is the first day of spring. The council have chopped all the elms down in Elm Tree Avenue.”
― Sue Townsend, The secret diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾

“It started, as many disasters do, with a long weekend in North Yorkshire.”
― Tom Cartledge, SaddleSore: From England to India